Copilot Notebooks and Pages, and when to use which

A Notebook is where you put the material Copilot should read. A Page is where what Copilot writes goes to be edited and shared. They sit at opposite ends of the same job, which is why reaching for one when you wanted the other is the usual way people bounce off both. If you are not sure which Copilot you have at all, start with which Copilot is which.

Notebooks: pinning Copilot to your own sources

Microsoft announced Notebooks on 23 April 2025 as a way to “pull together a wide range of content such as your notes, documents, websites, meeting recordings, and more”. The value is scope. Ordinary Copilot chat can search everything you have access to and has to guess which of your files matter. A Notebook takes the guess away: you name the sources, and answers come from those rather than from everything else in your tenant, which is Microsoft’s word for your organisation’s own walled-off area of its cloud, where your mail and files already sit.

To build one:

1. Open the Microsoft Copilot app, which Microsoft renamed from the Microsoft 365 Copilot app and is moving to copilot.cloud.microsoft, and sign in with your work account.
2. Pick Notebooks in the left navigation, then create a new notebook.
3. Add your references. Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, PDFs, links, images and existing Copilot pages can all go in, and since August 2026 so can Outlook emails and Teams meetings, which bring their transcripts and chat along.
4. Ask your questions in the notebook’s own chat box, and the answers stay grounded in what you added.

In September 2026 Microsoft slimmed the app’s version down to what it calls “the quicker, light-weight Notebooks experience”. What Microsoft calls “the fuller, workspace-forward experience” now lives in OneNote, so if a feature you remember seems to have gone, look there.

Copilot re-reads those sources as they change, so a notebook pointed at a project plan that is still being edited stays current without you re-uploading anything. There is also an audio overview, which Microsoft describes as “a podcast-style audio overview of your content with two hosts”. I find it genuinely useful on a commute and slightly odd the first time you hear it.

Where this earns its place: a tender with fifteen supporting documents, or picking up a project someone else ran for a year. Any question you would otherwise answer by opening eight files and reading diagonally.

Pages: the shared document Copilot writes into

Pages came out a year earlier, on 16 September 2024, described by Microsoft as “a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration”. Put plainly, a good chat answer vanishes into scrollback, and a Page is how you stop that happening.

1. Ask Copilot something in chat as normal.
2. On a response worth keeping, choose Edit in Pages. The page opens beside the chat.
3. Carry on prompting on the left. Each response you send across is added to the bottom of the page on the right.
4. Edit the page directly, then share it by link or into Teams or Outlook.

People you share it with can edit at the same time you do, and can prompt Copilot from inside the page. On a phone you can now steer a page in words, “Shorten this page” for example, or ask chat to “Create a new page for” a topic. Microsoft’s own staff, writing up their internal rollout, describe using it for agendas and project planning, and were refreshingly blunt that “a lot of our early feedback wasn’t overwhelmingly positive. People were unsure of how they would use it.”

A Notebook is what Copilot reads. A Page is what Copilot writes. Chaining them, notebook first and page second, is the part worth learning.

Using them together

Build a notebook for the project, ask it the question you actually need answered, then push the useful answer to a page so colleagues can argue with it. The notebook keeps the reasoning anchored to real documents, and the page is where that output turns into something another person can pick up. A page can then be added back into the notebook as a source, which suits work that runs for months.

What to check before you rely on them

Licensing has moved recently. Notebooks started as a Microsoft 365 Copilot feature, and Microsoft’s pricing page now says it is “rolling out for Copilot Chat users”, which puts it within reach of colleagues who never got the paid add-on. The same page marks the free version “Limited capabilities” without spelling out the limits. Microsoft’s roadmap lists further work under its Frontier early-access programme, adding “richer work data sources, multimodal mobile capture, and new output types like Excel workbooks and infographics”. Check what your own account shows you today rather than trusting a figure from last year.

Two costs worth naming. A notebook is only as good as what you put in it, so one outdated document in the source list buys you confident, outdated answers, and the grounding makes them read more authoritatively than ordinary chat would. And a Page is a live shared document, so sharing it widely hands over everything on it, including the half-finished draft you meant to delete first.

Before pointing either at anything sensitive, read where Copilot sends your data.